Four major religions practiced in devastated southern Asia offer different beliefs to console followers stunned by unfathomable tragedy

Not only did the tsunami devastate southern Asia, it challenged its soul.

When the waves inundated India's coastal villages Sunday, thousands of pilgrims to a Marian shrine in Vailankanni were washed away as they attended mass. Bodies were buried in the sand, and the shrine suddenly became a morgue.

Spared by the waves, University of Chicago divinity student Kristin Bloomer, in the region to study Indian devotion to Mary, said by cell phone that she watched one man shout: "There is nothing! There is nothing! Where is God? What is God?" Then he burst into tears, hung his head and wept.

Scholars said each of the four major religions in the region, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, possesses a distinct theology that eventually will help people put the calamity in perspective and move forward.

But it will take time for survivors to reclaim their lives and recover their faith, they said.

"It does require spiritual resources that people of all faiths draw upon," said Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard Divinity School. "What one's faith gives you is the capacity to respond to a disaster, not necessarily to explain it."

For now, the immediate need is for food, shelter and protection from disease that threatens to claim more lives.

Bloomer, who has been unearthing bodies from the sand to bury or burn, said that the priests beside her have spent more time digging for the dead than counseling survivors.

Many devotees believe that their response to the catastrophe is a measure of piety.

"Events of this type are supposed to reopen the eyes of a believer," said Kareem Irfan, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. "Part of the test of life is dealing with suffering, how you react to suffering and how you help others out."

That inclination to help also exists within Christianity and in the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of dharma, or community.

"We try to keep our minds stronger to see and try to serve those who survived, those who lost their families, their relatives," said Ratana Thongkrajai, a Buddhist monk from Thailand with the Wat Phrasriratanamahadhatu Temple in Chicago. "We try to support them. Sitting and crying and sad, how can we can support them? We try to give a good thing, to share with them."

"The need of the hour is what's practical," said Matthew Kapstein, a visiting professor who specializes in Indian Buddhist philosophy at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The cataclysm could be an opportunity for monasteries to become havens for healing, he said. "That for most people is going to count for a lot more than any particular theological explanation."

Still, in the face of such devastation, victims are likely to be asking the big question: Why did this happen?

"Everybody has access to scientific explanations about tectonics," said Wendy Doniger, an expert in Hindu mythology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "Why should this be a natural calamity in your own life? That's what people care about."

Among the major religions in the affected area, Muslims are generally able to draw from the belief that a natural disaster is part of a divine plan beyond human comprehension. Christians take solace in the presence of God in the face of calamity.

Hindus and Buddhists, meanwhile, do not ascribe it to a divine plan but encourage devotees to let go and accept the ever-changing state of the universe and role of suffering in the human experience.

But in the Theravada Buddhist tradition most prevalent in Sri Lanka and Thailand, the doctrine of the eight-fold path--intended to help people cut off individual suffering--may do little to treat pain of such massive proportion.

"The usual kinds of question that humans ask--`Why me?'--is overwhelmed by the question of `Why us?'" said Charles Hallisey, a leading scholar of Theravada Buddhism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "I don't think anyone in this situation is going to have a ready answer."

In Hindu theology, theories for why such disasters occur are varied. Some attribute the destruction to the same deities that control childbirth and fertility, illustrating that those who create also destroy. Others subscribe to the Hindu concept of honi, the theory that undeserved catastrophes--when bad things happen to good people--is not karma catching up with them but inexplicable events that just happen.

"It is a natural event. We cannot do anything about it," said Krishna Rajan, a priest at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lemont. "Hold onto the god and hold onto the feet of the lord. He will give you the strength to go through what you have to go through."

But some Buddhists do accredit humankind's collective past deeds with destabilizing the universe and leading to disaster.